Приманивание Снарка.

Have watched more Legends of Tomorrow. These discs really don't want to come out of this box. I've put them on a thingy that used to have blank discs in and shall hope they'll be fine in there.

I just watched the one with Nate in Japan and I can see why the character has reasons to be kind of juvenile and talking like he learned from movies but also, he is a historian, his blorbos should be history.

I remember the Theme being grief this season, and I can see bits of that, but it is starting with a lot of other stuff, like Nate trying to act like an independent grown up (by totally ignoring his health stuff), or Ray being told he's nothing without the suit. I mean, the suit being a one off irreplaceable Thing is daft sci fi tech in the first place, but also, he's the guy that built it. I just feel like Tony Stark dealt with this in a lot fewer minutes than this arc is going to get.

I keep noticing how few women there are. Where are the rest of my Legends, hurry up, two out of eight is Ridiculous.

Having Amaya confront Mick is an interesting way to foreground how he's still The Felon (Sara being never convicted) but it's kind of like she's treating him according to his reputation when she's the only one who could never have heard it.

He's chatty with a knife to his throat. Bit of a concern how worried he isn't.

I still like these stories.

Today I listened to the Big Finish Doctor Who from the Monthly Range:
Harry Houdini's War.

It wasn't very good.

I have no objections to the Houdini bits, or the plot, I guess, but it did a cheat that breaks the story logic in half. Like it would work fine if ( Read more... ) So why were they acting that way? Mostly it doesn't make sense.

Either that or I needed to listen to it paying more attention and with less of a break between episodes and then it would come into focus.

I am grump now though, because the audio gives us even less than usual to work with to figure out what is going on, and then it tells a lie and you can't know that, and then I feel like my time was wasted.

Didn't like it.

Yesterday I sort of Didn't. There were tasks but I didn't. There was TV in the player but I didn't. There was audio adventure I've listened to the first episode of and it even ended on a cliffhanger but I didn't.

Eventually I got enough sleep my watch even thought it was enough, and then I tried using the Wrath of the Righteous wiki to find any equipment I've been missing (not much, mostly path specific), nd to choose an endgame set. It's tempting to just put all the bits from the DLC on at once, but the buffs don't really stack and some of it is going to be better for casters or melee etc. So I picked out a set and an alternate set for a caster and then picked some things to prestidigitate on top to make it even slightly visually acceptable, because you can have So Many Colors So Much if you just pick for the stats. And because a staff made of two snakes intertwined is a bit Much sometimes?

It gets boring once you've done Inevitable Excess because the Flawless versions of equipment are so much better you can't really afford not to use them, but they're also just the most basic stat things. Like sure you need the +8 to all mental stats and immunity to mind effecting, but it's boring. +8 to physical, yes okay, but all the belts are boring. +7 to resistance and then some Flawless on top? Well see also boring. And the Flawless ring you get early on once you've done Inevitable Excess is basically why my character survived Core but it is Still So Boring.

Magic items in Pathfinder have the required ones (natural armour, deflection, resistance, stats) and then the things that seem like actual magic instead of just Number Go Up. I like the Unchained version where Number Go Up *anyway* and you just get less money for magic, because then you can put interesting things in those slots instead.

Also it's a real drag on a roleplay level that there is so often a mathematically *correct* set of things to wear and choices to make. The Challenge Ratings make assumptions about you making those Correct choices and without them the GM can way overshoot. And the higher the difficulty goes, the more likely you are to lose TPK if you haven't done that very narrowly Correct thing everywhere.

Making up stories together is a different game than number go up.

And the way the DLC items are so much better is just pay to win with more hurdles if you think about it too hard. Cool adventure hurdles sometimes, but still.



But there was no specific reason to make that complain right now. I just woke up and did the Tuesday tasks and apparently this complain was in my brain queue.

I shall go and have my Wednesday breakfast instead.

Having had a nice day's sleep I woke up thinking that Legends of Tomorrow, characters departing from January 2016, encodes in its treatment of Gideon a specific set of assumptions about AI. Ones that do not quite hold in 2025.

Basically the characters treat Gideon like a voice interface, in early seasons, not an independent person with opinions.
And then they treat what Gideon says as Fact, especially if it has pictures.

Which is interesting because Rip Hunter is *clearly* manipulating them by showing them the pictures and only once they're having feelings telling them that's a simulation.
Simulation is another word for guess, even if Gideon does put a percentage next to it.

If you start now? You'd get a set of people who still believe Gideon because look, pictures and a percent from a computer, true facts. But you'd get other people who are aware that deepfake graphics do not make your report more reliable, and who would call the AI out for hallucinating.

The show does interrogate its own starting position but by making Gideon unquestionably an independent person and then making it a right mess that people did not treat her that way. Making it just as weird that Rip reprogrammed Gideon as that the Time Masters reprogrammed Mick. And that's always a good set of questions, are we treating this person as a thing.

Plus there's the gigo problem or the deliberately being lied to encoded in what the Time Masters fed their computer to get Rip hopping.

But asking questions about error rates and reliability were not the first thought of anyone in this story, and that's super weird, coming from a context where I've seen reports that the LLM currently being called AI have an error rate where between 80% and *all* the answers in that study had errors. No I don't have a source to cite, it was social media screenshots, so obviously I shouldn't believe it. I could google for it. Wonder what google says about reliability of AI... well it's not letting me copy paste the answer, that's interesting, but it says Not Fully Reliable and links to three items with the most recent being May 2025... and one having answers from 2023, how is that any use this year? Google reckons the majority of answers are accurate, where it links to things that say 31% of answers were errors. But then I rephrased and asked for a percent, "what percent of AI answers are correct" and it said AI answers were incorrect between 60% and 94% of the time. It is talking about studies without linking them. The links it does go to are news summaries not studies, and they're from March 2025. Oh, here's a study I probably saw because BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2025/new-ebu-research-ai-assistants-news-content , news summarised by GenAI wrong 45% of the time across all AI, some AI as bad as 76% wrong. So a few minutes with the google AI get me two contradictory poorly sourced answers, where the sources have different numbers than the AI summary, which is what usually happens when I read the google AI bit. And my memory is also poorly sourced! And skimming the links proffered tends to show a lot of podcasts and video content which is hard to check and... ugh. (This is me demonstrating very sloppy research on my part and how AI isn't helping. I feel embarrassed now. I am in fact capable of poking several pages of links, it's just the show always takes the first AI answer, and lo, it is messy.)

I do not trust AI because no matter how precisely defined the question is about stuff I already know, ie Pathfinder first edition, I always get an answer that is muddled with irrelevant sources and some degree of just plain wrong, ie about DnD 5e and using fandom wiki about computer games instead. Yes the terms are very similar but I have yet to be able to narrow its attention down to just Archive of Nethys or Paizo sources *and that used to be easy*. It used to be quicker to google search than to search on AoN or PFSRD or the paizo boards. Now it is an error prone mess that keeps trying to send you to DnDBeyond even though that is a completely different game. ... different edition branched off the same source yes I can see where the confusion is coming from but the confusion is *new* and *annoying*.

So: Legends Gideon. No one spends time questioning her sources or her error rate or how deepfakes are actually helping this situation or how many *other* scenarios for a future she finds equally plausible right now. And that stuff is absolutely essential. It's the core of how Rip gets led around by his training. And it's not just Legends where it matters, there's a whole thread of the Flash that goes back to the historical record and how it (mis)represents him, the reliability of sources and how history was written by his wife, without her admitting the connection. ... this will turn into my Eobard Thawne Has A Point Actually speech, and I don't think I watched the last season of Flash yet so I'll leave be. But really. Computer 'intelligence' and the authoritative misrepresentation of mediated reality: A Thread.

Pretty important in the real world as well.